College Enrollment Among White Students Dropping Faster Than Other Groups

College Enrollment Among White Students Dropping Faster Than Other Groups

Doesn’t this conflict with everything the left has been telling us for years?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Where Are the White Students?

For more than a decade, college officials have watched their incoming classes steadily shrink, nudging them closer and closer to an enrollment cliff that experts say campuses could be tumbling off in the next year or two.

Civil-rights advocates, higher-education officials, and politicians have long tussled over how best to boost the college-enrollment rate for students of color and reconcile with the sector’s racist past. With affirmative action now banned and diversity efforts being dismantled, much of the recent national focus has been on how to legally keep the doors open for students from underrepresented minority groups and make sure they have the tools to succeed.

But in a twist that’s caught even some demographers by surprise, it’s the white students colleges have typically relied upon to fill their seats whose numbers are plummeting the fastest.

Over the last decade, undergraduate enrollment of white students has dropped more than that of any other racial group, according to federal data, a Chronicle analysis, and several outside experts. The effects continue to be felt in college classrooms.

Since 2018, enrollment among white undergraduates has dropped by 19 percent across all sectors, compared with 11 percent among Black students. The drop in white enrollment is nearly three times the almost 7-percent decline among college students overall, according to Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The disparity has significantly worsened since the pandemic, as minority enrollment has begun to stabilize while white enrollment continues to slide.

The extent of the shift snuck up on many demographers. “White enrollments were declining even before the pandemic across all sectors,” Shapiro says. “We didn’t really notice it until the last couple of years. When the pandemic started in 2020, we were focused on race and ethnicity and the large declines in Black and Hispanic enrollments,” especially at two-year colleges.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.